So he says something that you do not agree with makes him lose your respect.

Have you forgotten what opinions and individualism is?

What exactly did he say to lose your respect?
It's true that there are lot of sexist, homophobic religious nut jobs in the republican party. What is it he said that you disagree with let alone to disagree with so much to lose respect for him?

I had heard before about the self induced abortion and lots of other crazyhouse "theories", but always assumed that those were coming from nutjobs in their attempt to get their 5 minutes of fame. And even if someone like that would slip in the ranks of a major political party, the rest would see it to their benefit to keep him in low profile.

Look, I can understand incompetence in politicians and have come to expect in most cases. But this open display of stupidity from key members of the party is absolutely shocking....

Romney's campaign motto was "Real change from day one"...seems legit.

That's funny, I'm not any of those things. Go figure.

A big reason Obama won? The GOP does not know how to get out its message that we can obtain gains in science and technology, and even social matters, without doing so at taxpayer cost through government spending. The party does not know how to get around the mistaken notions that you post above. Are there some knuckleheads like you mention? Of course, just as there are supra-left knuckleheads. The Democrats know how to blow off those messages and the GOP doesn't. Simple as that.

And this really illustrates that problem. Two individual people, and you're able to label the entire "Republican right" as being like this. And I'll bet (obviously I can't prove it) most of those reading this thread were making a mental head-nod in agreement, even though it was, again, just two people.

I tend to vote rightward for various reasons but I don't agree at all with those particular opinions of those two particular candidates. Buuuut, there's something that lets the message go through and gets people to agree with what you say, that if you vote on the right then you think like these guys.

Ditto the whole birth control / reproductive rights thing. If anyone thinks Romney would have started banning or otherwise limiting people from purchasing their own birth control, let me point out two things:

- he said it was a state-level issue if it's an issue at all
- yabingle: supreme court contraception

Both of those points? Totally glazed over by Maher and the rest in their (successful) attempt to wrongly describe the Republican ticket's point on the matter.

And yet, you decry my painting of the Right as something based on two statements, but try to use yourself as a barometer...

It isn't a "mistaken notion" when that is pretty much all you hear from the GOP candidates. The Democrats can, and probably have, said some profoundly stupid things, but the GOP candidates and office holders have shown, IMO, to have an unbelievable level of ignorance of basic concepts.

They can't get that message out because THEY DON'T HAVE THAT MESSAGE. Or if they do, then it is buried so far under Outlaw Abortion, God, Climate Change Is A Myth, and Evolution Is A Myth that it will soon turn to oil for them to drill up.

It's not just these two people. Chances are, when you see a profoundly stupid quote, it's going to be a Republican making it. All the time? No, of course not. But again, chances are, it'll be right-winger saying it.

If I didn't know better, I'd say the Right has become a performance art piece.

It doesn't matter if you think like them so long as you vote for them. You can disagree with their stances or their statements, but so long as you keep them in office, you are promoting and ok'ing their stances. They are the ones making the laws and so long as the Right has this hard-on for outlawing abortion (rather than, ya know, doing anything of any actual importance), you will continue to see pandering and ignorant statements like the above.

You dance with the ones what brung you. If Romney's contributors would've wanted it banned or otherwise made unreasonably difficult to get, I can say with a high degree of presumption, that it would've happened.

However, the idea that Romney could've done ANY of the things he stated depends upon one thing...Congress going along with it. And, hopefully, the Dems would've pulled the same bullshit whining and tantrum throwing that the Republicans have been pulling for the last four years.

Thankfully, we'll never have to find out because this is the second time Romney has been told to GTFO.

This is true. Of course, some of it goes all the way back to Clinton, since the banking collapse was totally his fault (unless someone wants to claim the Republicans were behind the idea to give loans out to basically EVERYONE, which is laughable). On the same token, all of those defaulted loans laid on people who couldn't afford them in the first place also goes to Clinton.

Bush screwed up a lot, but I'm tired of him getting blamed for EVERYTHING.

I am guessing in my curent life time US politics will destroy what some would at one time been proud to represent what we call USA. I am Canadien and I will be the first to say I dont support Obama even though for some reason the rest of my Canadiens just love him and he does no wrong....

Continue USA on your downfall I wish it wasn't so but we watch and wait because it is coming on your current trajectory. The states needs a revolution even if blood to fix all this beuacracy nonsense hell most western countries have become lazy, corrupt, over regulate more laws then sense

This made me LOL.

http://i.imgur.com/Ihma1.jpg

You can't ignore the fact that the Republican party is beholden to the religious right and people who act like science and education are evil. The party props them up and runs them again and again, and in today's media environment it's suicide.

I KNOW there are conservatives who think that is all bullshit and simply vote Republican out of desperate hope they one day stand for the small government they talk a lot about. I was one of them for a long time. But you need to realize the Republican party doesn't actually stand for this and sabotages itself at every turn with the moral bullshit.

I'm not sure what the answer is. A new part focusing solely on fiscal conservatism would likely be trounced by the Democrats too as it would split the right. I also think that time of small government might be socially over, a structure and ideal better suited to a time before mass immigration, mass-media and the internet. America as a place for individual achievement rather than societal achievement might be a fading memory. Some events in my own life have certainly caused me to swing wildly to the other side.

These demographic changes are not going away. I don't know how Republicans and fiscal conservatives can fight it all.

I guess Obama's parents didn't raise him right. I was taught to take responsibility for my actions. The blame Bush excuse worked for about a year. After that, be a man and stand on your own two feet. Of course, it's hard to expect leadership from a someone who hung the Americans in Libya out to dry.

I thought this was really funny. But then I googled Bill Maher and found out he's a board member for PETA. So it turns out he's really just as nutty as the people he's making fun of. Still a funny video though.

There's nothing like new rules. I miss having HBO /sniff

Yes and except for the budget, all of those are GOP problems. Since he was elected we've gone from losing 800k jobs a month to gaining about 170k a month. Despite the GOP refusing to help work on the economy.

$5tn in new debt? Seriously? President Bush added more debt than that, most of President Obama's debt was taking the Iraq and Afghanistan tabs and putting them actually on the count. Bush always kept those off the ledger via supplementary expenditures.

Enormous growth in food stamps? Is the alternative letting people starve really a desirable outcome? If you don't like that, then perhaps you might want to have a word with GWB and the GOP for burning down the economy. Unlike tax cuts for the rich, food stamps and welfare are pure stimulus and quite effective at keeping people from revolting. What's more, businesses do not add jobs just because there's more investment, they add jobs because they're expecting to do more business.

Enormous growth in SSDI payments is to be expected, it wasn't being paid out at the rate it was supposed to be. I know plenty of people who needed it and where they took years before they got the benefits they were entitled to. Then the government had to make back payments.

In other words, perhaps bother to do some actual research before posting these sorts of ill informed lists would be a good idea.
Bill Maher is part nutty, part hilarious and part insightful genius. You can't take what he says completely seriously, but he's often times quite on top of it. His show got canceled in 2001 for not pretending like he didn't have some idea why terrorists might do it. A rather gutsy, insightful and nutty thing to say at the time.
I disagree with that strongly. A real man owns up precisely to the things for which he is responsible, no more, no less.

And it's not an excuse. Apart from some far right nutjobs nobody really believes that any President could clean up the crater that the country was in after the Bush Administration burnt the country to the ground. It takes time and President Obama has done an astonishingly good job considering that he doesn't have the votes to get a cloture vote and the GOP refuses to do anything that would remotely help the country out.